Programming a conversational agent to carry out multi-turn dialogues requires detailed planning and careful implementation. It is a three-stage refining process including drawing up a blueprint/diagram for the conversational flow, implementing the diagram, and testing and refining by repeating until it is satisfied. First two steps are difficult to keep in synchronization because they are implemented in two different places. An all-in-one solution is more desirable for rapid development.
Besides dialogue management, understanding utterances in every turn of dialogue is essential. It is also a refining process including defining intents/entities to be predicted in a dialogue, annotating training samples and train a prediction system, testing and evaluating performance, and refining by repeating these steps until it is satisfied. Such manual operations are time consuming and inefficient.